How to Use a Body Fat Scale to Measure your Dieting Progress

It is not uncommon to meet a friend who has started dieting for the first time and is complaining about logging inches around the belly and the hips without seeing much improvement after weighing herself on a scale. If you’ve started an exercise program coupled with a healthy diet, you might have had a similar experience. This article will help you understand what’s going on with your body composition, and how using a body fat scale might help you better manage your diet by calculating your BMI.

As a matter of fact, losing inches but not weight and in some cases, even gaining weight is a phenomenon that troubles many fledgling dieters. What many fitness rookies do not know is that the human body is much more complex that they think and fat is not the only substance that is added and removed from your the body when you gain or lose weight. Below, I will discuss the concept of body composition and will tell you how a body fat scale can help you when you are confused about your progress.

What Exactly is the Body Composition?

The human body consists of several types of tissues but the bulk of the body weight comes from a few basic types of tissues namely fat, muscle and bone. There is also a lot of water in the body distributed between different tissues and the blood and it makes up approximately two-thirds of your body weight.

Of all these components, water is the most vacillating concerning its total mass in your body. The amount of body water will fluctuate sharply every time you sip a drink or use the bathroom. It will also change when you eat and exercise and when you sweat. As for bone mass, that’s pretty consistent. The total weight of bones tissue in an adult will remain the same unless he suffers some sort of disease or serious calcium or vitamin D deficiency.

Muscle and fat in the body take more investment of time to increase in mass or to break down. However, there are the two types of tissues that cause the most significant long-term change in the total body weight. Muscle is a dense and compact sort of tissue and will not grow and increase unless you stimulate its growth by exercising. You would also need to eat the right type of food if you want more muscle. As you probably know, fat is much easier to build up. It requires no exercise and you can gain fat from any sort of food as long as you are eating more calories that you are burning. Fat is a soft tissue with little density so fat build-up adds to your bodys volume in a significant way as it adds to the number you see on the bathroom scale and thats how you become fat.

Body composition basically means the percentage of the major tissue types in your total weight. Because fat is usually the concern of people who want to be and look fit, body fat percentage is the most sought piece of information about the body composition. As a matter of fact, body fat percentage or simply body fat is often used synonymously with body composition.

What Has This Got To Do With You Losing Inches But Not Weight?

As noted above, fat takes a lot of space while muscle is rather lean and can make you heavy without actually making you big. People who are categorized as built or brawny, have a lot of muscle and little fat. They do not look as large as people who are obese. Yet,

they are often very heavy. The weight of such people is caused by the muscle tissue. In other words, building muscle makes the human body more compressed and dense. Then, muscle adds more pounds than it adds inches. This is probably what is going on in your body when you are sure that you are getting slim but your bathroom scale is telling you are not losing any weight. You are probably burning fat and losing volume. You are also losing some weight but it is being replaced by the weight of the new muscle cells your body is creating in reaction to your intense exercise routine. You are replacing the spacious fat tissue with dense muscle tissue and getting thinner without getting lighter. This is good because you are not only becoming fit and strong, you are also becoming slim and good-looking. If this is the case, you are on the right track but how do you know that it is actually the case?

Usage of a Body Fat Scale

Body fat scales are special scales that look pretty much like your bathroom scale but can tell you things the plain weight scale would never tell. When you step on a body fat scale, it will show you an estimation on the percentage of fat in your body in addition to your body weight. Availability of such information can give you unprecedented control over your diet and exercise program and can help you overcome the lack of confidence caused by the numbers you have been seeing on your regular bathroom scale.Estimation of the body fat percentage by an electronic scale is possible thanks to what is called the electrical impedance analysis technology. The scale sends a very weak electrical signal through your body and makes a calculation based on your bodys electrical resistance. Fat transfers electric much better than muscle and the

Estimation of the body fat percentage by an electronic body fat scale is possible thanks to what is called the electrical impedance analysis technology. The scale sends a very weak electrical signal through your body and makes a calculation based on your bodys electrical resistance. Fat transfers electric much better than muscle and the scales estimation basically depends on this difference. Some body fat scales also ask you to manually enter information about your gender and height and use this data to fine-tune the body composition calculation.The question that many ask about body fat scales is whether they are reliable tools. This is a legitimate question because analyzing the composition of a human body through an electric signal looks a shaky way of measuring your fat percentage, indeed. The truth is even some of the best body fat scales can fail if making them fail is your purpose. All you have to do is to get it to measure

The question that many ask about body fat scales is whether they are reliable tools. This is a legitimate question because analyzing the composition of a human body through an electric signal looks a shaky way of measuring your fat percentage, indeed. The truth is even some of the best body fat scales can fail if making them fail is your purpose. All you have to do is to get it to measure your body fat percentage and go get a glass of water and come back to get another and probably a different body fat percentage estimation. Body fat scale measurements are dramatically affected by hydration levels so if you are planning to own one of these, you have to make sure your body is in a similar condition concerning water levels, every time you step on the scale. The best way to overcome this issue and get reliable measurments is to step on the scale once a day and always at the same time of the day such as right after you get out of the bed.

Elissa Cohen is a consumer advocate. She is a lifelong resident of Dallas, TX and a teacher and personal finance contributor to Seekyt. She mentors college graduates and young couples getting a start in life with financial advice and life strategies for for family and financial security.